Abstract
In this chapter, Samantha Copeland explores the research into the nature of sagacity in instances of serendipity—the particular kind of wisdom that allows some individuals to see the potential value in an unexpected, accidental encounter with another person, place or thing. She takes on the problem of what an “art of serendipity” could be, and uses the lenses of episteme, techne and metis to reveal what expertise, talents, perspectives and relationships should constitute the practice of such an art. In particular, a focus on metis, commonly known as “cunning wisdom”, and an exploration of recent research on integrating serendipity into practice are found to highlight the importance of standpoint, responsiveness and relational support as the key elements that practitioners of the art of serendipity seem to bring together when they generate opportunities out of chance.
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Notes
- 1.
In fact, as Serafina Cuomo (2007) describes it in Technology and Culture in Greek and Roman Antiquity, the task of defining techne as it was used in ancient Greece and Rome is both “arduous” and idealistic, given the variety of definitions and understandings at play, as well as their normative content. Mark Thomas Young (2017) similarly describes the complex entanglement of meanings and values used to distinguish between craft skills and local knowledge, both forms of techne, in early modern discourse about scientific practice.
- 2.
Such a focus on what is in the mind at the moment of a chance encounter has several implications, many of which I explore in more depth elsewhere (Copeland, 2018, 2019). Some of those are implications for our understanding of discovery: by emphasising the innate or accumulated wisdom needed to see the value in an unexpected observation, one upholds the single-moment and genius-generated model of scientific discovery. But it is also well-known among sociologists, historians and philosophers of science that such discoveries occur most often in a process, and always within a context, and even extend socially through networks (particularly in modern, collaborative science) as well as over time. Here I would like to focus on the implications of the internalist approach for understanding sagacity.
- 3.
Examples of this personal level of serendipity leading to changes in one’s worldview can be found in the autobiography of ecologist James Estes (2020), for example, and in the 2008 Darwin College Lectures, the Serendipity series, particularly the last, given by author Simon Winchester (in de Rond & Morley, 2008).
- 4.
See David Matthews, Times Higher Education, ‘The Francis Crick Institute: Science and serendipity’, November 26, 2015; https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/the-francis-crick-institute-science-and-serendipity.
- 5.
Austin defines this sagacity as operating by the “Pasteur Principle”—as one can guess, this is equivalent to the prepared mind, with the “added level of chance” I note elsewhere in this chapter also noted by Austin (2003): “Some special receptivity born from past experience permits you to discern a new fact, or to perceive ideas in a new relationship, and go on to comprehend their significance”, as he describes it (p. 76). Since this approach to sagacity is remarkably passive and chance-laden, I do not use it in the paper, for reasons that should be obvious to the reader by the concluding paragraphs at latest.
- 6.
As Fleming noted in his banquet speech upon accepting the Nobel Prize in 1945, his skills as a bacteriologist are what allowed him to perceive and pursue the value he saw in the mold’s effects within the petri dish (and, as he notably also remarks, his lack of skills in the clinic and in chemistry prevented his own discovery of the truly remarkable properties of this substance until Florey and Chain’s team was able to). https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1945/fleming/speech/.
- 7.
Notably, Erdelez notes that they mention not only regularly encountering more information useful to their own purposes, but also information that is relevant to other people they know (1999, p. 26).
- 8.
- 9.
As Nicholas Dew argues, for instance, serendipity can ground particular strategies in entrepreneurship, such as the effectual reasoning approach described and developed by Dew and Sarah Sarasvathy (see Dew, 2009 for an introduction to this connection).
- 10.
For a cat, in contrast, the chair may afford a landing pad for a complicated series of jumps to the kitchen counter. Humans and cats, and others with varying needs, abilities, or experiences, will see different affordances in the objects they encounter.
- 11.
I owe the idea for this exploration of Metis in the context of serendipity specifically to a memorable dinner conversation with Mark Thomas Young. Errors made here in the use and interpretation of concepts such as episteme, techne and metis are all my own, and I happily refer the reader to work by Young for a more complete and nuanced investigation (e.g. Young, 2017, 2019).
- 12.
Readers familiar with Greek modes of reasoning may wonder why I do not speak of phronesis here, rather than metis. Briefly, phronesis is a mode of reasoning we employ when we have to consider the particularities of a situation in order to know the right thing to do. But it is not so much a reflexive, responsive mode of reasoning, as metis is. Work on phronesis, in contrast to the work on metis I use here, does not emphasise the role of chance and ambiguity, nor parallel the recent work on serendipity, so the strong parallels I draw here between episteme, techne and metis do not hold for phronesis. While I have touched in other work on the moral aspects of phronesis (Copeland, 2020), I also leave open for now the question of whether there are virtues associated with metis, as there are with phronesis. Exploring such overlaps and distinctions between them is a matter for another paper.
- 13.
As James Scott points out in respect to how Odysseus’ metis is described in myth, “The emphasis is both on Odysseus’s ability to adapt successfully to a constantly shifting situation and on his capacity to understand, and hence outwit, his human and divine adversaries” (Scott, 1998, p. 313). But when we are talking serendipity, we turn this on its head: rather than escaping from a situation, serendipity is about taking up an opportunity for increased value (as I noted in the introduction, it has a distinctly positive valence in our rhetoric). There is thus more to explore about the relationship between metis as “cunning”, its negative valence, and who has been said to have metis in our narratives, as well as who gets the credit for being serendipitous in science (e.g. see Copeland, 2018) but that also lies outside the scope of this particular chapter.
- 14.
From a blog post about that poster presentation, retrieved from here (March 2021): https://theserendipitysociety.wordpress.com/2020/01/27/haiku-reflections-in-research-on-serendipity/.
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Copeland, S. (2022). Metis and the Art of Serendipity. In: Ross, W., Copeland, S. (eds) The Art of Serendipity. Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84478-3_3
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